


Starting

by Tierfal



Category: Death Note
Genre: Alternate Universe, Friendship, Gen, General
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-02-20
Updated: 2010-02-20
Packaged: 2017-10-07 10:20:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,073
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/64189
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tierfal/pseuds/Tierfal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There <i>had</i> to be something else -- didn't there?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Starting

**Author's Note:**

  * For [the_gabih](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=the_gabih).



Light watched the television screen, the sound low, muddled, mumbling. He fought back a melodramatic sigh, because that was just pouring salt in his own wounds.

He turned his back on the TV—it was just another report about the thing in America, where people had started dying at random, and some creep had jumped onto the internet, proclaiming himself the herald of the Second Coming. It was all over now, which was alarming everybody a bit in and of itself: the deaths had stopped, and the whole thing had gone quiet. Each newscaster seemed to have a theory, but Light knew what had happened—some special ops team had taken the idiot down, and now they were hushing it all up so no one figured out how the killings had been done. Must have been something weird, if the Americans were being so uncharacteristically effectual about it.

Light was just tired. He was still top in everything at school, and he was playing tennis three days a week, and he spent pretty much every spare minute here in the police station, where he had what was officially known as an "internship." What it really meant was that he worked part-time around school and sport, got paid the same wage as the pros, and earned it. He had basically everything he could have asked for, if you thought about it.

The problem was that there was something else, and he didn't know how to ask for it at all. There _had_ to be something else—didn't there? Some part of him was waiting, coiled, for danger. For a challenge. For anything that would dropkick his world right of its axis and send it careening out into space, knocking asteroids every which way as it went. He was just killing time. He was just filling the space, trying not to notice that he couldn't reach the corners. He was just wearing himself out so that he'd be too tired to notice the lack. He was holding out for something he couldn't even identify.

He swung his chair back around and watched headlines roll across the marquee at the bottom of the screen—little tragedies, pithily encapsulated, here and then gone. He reached over to his right, gauging the distance out of the corner of his eye. One of the few perks of this arrangement was the fact that some Coffee Fairy always filled his mug when he wasn't looking. That part he liked.

When the news went to commercial, Light looked down at the paperwork.

It shouldn't have been called "paperwork." It should have been called "mound of bureaucratic misery," because that was what it was.

There was no glamor in this. There was no greater cause, and there was no satisfaction. For every mugger they put behind bars, another man ran out of money. For every criminal they convicted, another one hired a lawyer they couldn't beat. They were Sisyphus. Justice was only a word.

Light pushed the mound of bureaucratic misery aside and gathered himself to his feet. He needed some air; that was all. He needed a few deep breaths of Toyko pollution, and he'd be all right.

When he got to the roof, he discovered that it was raining. He hadn't even noticed that.

He pushed the door open anyway and stepped outside, turning his collar up against the wind. Just a minute. Just a few good seconds alone with his thoughts. They were the only ones he trusted these days anyway.

One minute was two, and two were four, and multiplication was not Light's friend this afternoon.

The door slammed behind him, and he resisted the urge to turn. Maybe if he acted crazy enough, whoever it was would go away and leave him to his lunacy.

There was a pause, and then footsteps wandered across the concrete, splashing softly in the rain. Matsuda sidled into Light's peripheral vision, and he steeled himself for a long, rambling monologue about who might have stolen the last donut in the break room that morning.

Instead, there was silence—silence but for a thousand rounded raindrops falling, diving, bursting as they hit the ground.

If that wasn't a metaphor for life, Light didn't know what was. They grew, they dropped, and they disappeared, indistinguishable from the detritus of all the others of their kind.

The thought of anonymity was sickening.

"Nice day," Matsuda said, at which point Light gave in and stared at him.

Matsuda grinned and wiped a few streams of rainwater off of his forehead—a futile gesture, given that the rain kept coming.

"Every day's a nice day," he explained. "You wake up at the start, and then you can make it into anything."

Having focused on the rain again, Light glanced at him sidelong. "Do you honestly believe that?" he asked.

"I believe a lot of things," Matsuda replied—which was a little strange, given that Matsuda wasn't known for enigmatic answers. "I even know a few. For instance, I know that you, Light, can be anything you want."

"Right now," Light muttered, "I'm soaking wet."

Matsuda leaned back against the railing, folding his arms across his similarly drenched shirt.

"Light," he said, "do you know why I became a detective?"

Light wrung out his bangs with both hands. "No."

Matsuda smiled. "My mom was a cop. And at home, she was just my mother, you know? She made me snacks and watched weird soap operas and read me bedtime stories. But she took me to work with her, once, on a Saturday, and she was still my mom—but she was also this wonderful woman I'd never met. She was clever and organized and in-control. She was delegating, and moving files, and she had her hair tied back, and she was _amazing_. And I knew—just then—that I wanted to be like that, too. I wanted to have that other person in me, who knew what he was doing, who was out there every day, helping people, making things right. I wanted to be fixing things, you know? This way, in small ways, every way I could. So that's the path I chose, even when it wasn't easy for me. It was what I wanted for myself. It still is."

He pushed his hair out of his face and grinned ruefully when the rain sent it slipping back into his eyes.

"It'll be easy for you, Light," he said. "You're young. You're likable. You're good-looking. You're really, _really_ smart. The whole world's yours if you're willing to reach for it. Aren't doorways more interesting than blank walls? Find one. Try it. If you don't like it, walk back out again, and pick a different one. You're not going to get anywhere if you don't start. Starting's all you have to do."

Light was staring again. Utter disbelief tended to have that effect.

Matsuda clapped his shoulder, which squelched.

"Now I'm going to go stick my head under the hand-dryer in the bathroom," he announced. "See you later, Light."

Watching Matsuda's retreating back blur in the rain, Light wondered if maybe the man was right. Hadn't he always turned it around before—turned frustration into another reason to fight?

After giving the weight in his stomach another moment to settle as resolve instead of resignation, Light went back inside. It was a good thing he had his tennis things under his desk; hours of wet shoes probably would have sabotaged his plans to alter his outlook.

Miraculously, Light was still feeling pretty optimistic while he finished up his homework, pretending not to notice as the clock trespassed well beyond midnight. When he finally collapsed in bed after one last glance at the stack of success on the desktop, he didn't have the energy for doubt. Matsuda was right. Things would change.

But when his alarm blared, it was a familiar sound, and when he cracked his eyes open, they revealed the same ceiling.

He slammed his fist down on the snooze button and pressed the heels of his hands into his eye sockets. Today would start early—start _now_—and end late. He would trace another perfect circle, adding to the rings that ranged across his calendar, invisible to everybody else. The only thing that was different about today was that he had woken up wondering what had ever possessed him to believe that Matsuda could say something useful.

It was still raining, heavily and vindictively, like the sky was spitting on him, too. Just walking to class got Light's backpack soaked, and the edges of all his homework papers were damp, black ink bleeding until he couldn't read his name. He slogged through the day largely because he didn't have a choice—it was this or go home and play feverish.

He was sick, all right, but he doubted they could give him an antibiotic for wanting more.

He was, somehow, even wetter by the time he dragged himself into the police station, fighting the urge to pick up the pile of paperwork and throw it like confetti into the air. That was what he needed—something worth celebrating. Something to appreciate.

He couldn't hear the rain tapping anxious fingers on the windows, but he could hear his own hair dripping onto his collar and his desk.

Matsuda probably couldn't have been _more_ wrong, come to think of it. Light was young, admittedly—but he was arrogant and off-putting, he certainly looked like shit today, and if he couldn't even talk himself out of a bad mood, how intelligent could he be?

Light tried not to ooze rainwater on any necessary forms, surreptitiously watching his colleagues as they proceeded back and forth by his desk. The guy who did the filing hated him—wanted him dead, probably; would have enjoyed breakdancing on his grave. That was a hatred Light felt he had to field. Somebody had to be the one to inform people of their errors, or problems wouldn't get corrected. If incompetents were going to hate him for stepping up and shouldering the job, that was something he'd have to deal with.

It still stung.

Stinging Light could suffer, but there were worse pains threatening, hanging like an executioner's axe. Sometimes, when Light was expounding some solution, following a razor-sharp syllogism he'd laid out in his head, he'd catch sight of his father watching him, looking like he didn't know where his son had come from. Like he was terrified of where Light might go next.

They were scared of him—the other cops, the other detectives. Just conceptualizing his capacity terrified them all.

He lived in a world designed for other people. He was alone.

Rare things were precious, but singular things—things so unique that no one knew how to quantify them—were worthless.

Light was tired and overextended, and he had nowhere to go. There was no occasion to rise to, and there was nowhere to run. He didn't even know what he expected—what exactly could he request, even if he had the words? There was kerosene in his veins, but it might as well have been water when there was no spark in sight.

"Light," Matsuda's voice said, and he bit back a curt dismissal—the last thing he wanted was a repeat of yesterday's lecture.

When he turned, however, expression composed, Matsuda just tipped the coffee pot, smiling, and filled Light's cup.

"Nice day," he said, and walked away.

Light's very considerable memory chose that moment to retrieve something he hadn't thought about in years—not since he was fifteen, when his father had first described the new addition to the team.

_"He's awfully young, but he's brave, and he means well. I've been warned it gets the best of him in serious situations, but I want to give him a chance—his mother was a cop, and you can tell that's why he does it. She had a beat not far from here. Routine robbery one night, is what they said. Her partner didn't see that the guy had a gun until it was way too late, and she died in the hospital. The kid I hired, her son—he was ten years old. I get the feeling he'll be worth the trouble."_

Maybe you didn't need to know your destination—maybe all you needed was a direction to move.

Maybe starting was all you had to do.


End file.
